startups

True-colour image of Ireland on an extremely rare, cloudless day.

Out of a population of 4.59 million there exists in Ireland a potential workforce of just over 2 million people. (Currently, the unemployed account for a sickeningly large 14.3% of that number.) However, by virtue of education and temperament only a very small subset of those available to work are either willing or able to involve themselves in the challenges of entrepreneurship in the tech sector.

Dublin Startup Weekend is taking place across the weekend of the 25th of February at the Digital Hub in Dublin. The organisers Sean Murphy and Amy Neale were so “blown away with what people were able to achieve over the weekend” at the last Dublin Startup Weekend held in May 2010 that they have decided to run it again.

We spoke to Amy, who is a Program Manager at NDRC which is s an enterprise focused on translating research output into commercial products, about what will be happening this year.

How did the idea for Dublin Startup Weekend come about?

David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the creators of Basecamp. It is a web-based application designed to help people share and coordinate the ongoing work they have to do on their projects. At Technology Voice we use it primarily to keep track of to-do lists and schedules, but also for other things such as shared document editing. Last year, David gave a talk at Future of Web Apps which is being held again in London in October, and we thought we would share some of our notes from his session.